You have to remember this is rediscovering the past in ways that previous cultures only had mythology around. The fact that this paper is basically “Stone Age people aren’t less sophisticated” is a relatively new idea since levi strauss reinvented anthropology in the 1950s and 1960s

Hindu, then Greek then confuscian theologian-philosophers laid the foundations for the idea that their group had left behind simply being “animals” and sought out to distinguish human form (in their specific form) from all other forms of life.

Humans also approach things linearly and it fights intuition that regression is not just possible but the norm.

Ancient Greeks attributed Mycenaean remains to the “Age of Heroes”. They were amazed by the scale and engineering quality of the work and thought it was done by gods and mythical creatures such as Cyclopes. They didn’t approach progress linearly or mono-dimensionally.

Heinrich Schliemann was probably the first to connect the myths with tangible proof through archeology in late 19th century. While Lévi-Strauss work was much later and more political and polemical rather than scientific.

TIL, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_anthropology founded by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_L%C3%A9vi-Strauss, not to be confused with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levi_Strauss.

Glorious ancient people of Kazakhstan had internet over wires made of copper and tin, powered by steam energy from the puffs of llamas. Very nice!